Your privacy and confidentiality

Analytics

This website is created using Squarespace and it collects personal information to site analytics, including:

  • Information about your browser, network, and device

  • Web pages you visited prior to coming to this website

  • Your IP address

This information may also include details about your use of this website, including:

  • Clicks

  • Internal links

  • Pages visited

  • Scrolling

  • Searches

  • Timestamps

Through Squarespace I use this information to learn about site traffic and activity.

Cookies

This website uses cookies and similar technologies, which are small files or pieces of text that download to a device when a visitor accesses a website or app.

These necessary and required cookies are always used, which allow Squarespace to securely serve this website to you.

Analytics and performance cookies are also used on this website, only when you acknowledge the cookie banner, to enable me to view site traffic, activity and other data through Squarespace and Google Analytics.

Client data

When you book an appointment or call with me through this website, your name, email address and appointment time are collected through Acuity Scheduling. I then record this information in a password-protected Google Drive account, and use it only to contact you about your appointment or any further queries you raise with me.

If you have an initial consultation or single session talk with me, I will give you a paper form to complete which asks for the following:

  • Name

  • Age

  • Address, email address and phone number

  • GP name, address and phone number

  • Four yes/no questions about your mental health

  • How you heard about me

You are not required to provide any of this information if you prefer not to. I only use your address for agreed correspondence, eg invoices. I will not contact your GP without consulting you. I keep these paper forms in a locked filing cabinet and destroy them six years after our last appointment.

At an initial consultation or single session talk, I also (if you give your consent) take written notes, which I afterwards transcribe into a password-protected Google Drive account. For confidentiality, this is a separate account from the one where I store your personal details, and all notes are anonymised. The written notes are shredded once they have been transcribed into Google Drive.

If you have ongoing therapy with me, I write notes after every session, which are anonymised and stored in this same password-protected Google Drive account, separate from your personal details. You may also want to read Google’s privacy policy.

I keep session notes for six years after our last session together, in case you decide to return to therapy, then I shred any paper records and delete any electronic records. If you want your records to be destroyed/deleted sooner, just let me know.

Online sessions

Online sessions are held on Zoom. Sessions are encrypted and passcode protected, and I use Zoom’s waiting room functionality to ensure that only you and me can enter the session. You may also want to read Zoom’s privacy policy.

Client confidentiality

Everything you tell me is treated as confidential. I may be required to break confidentiality if you disclose:

  • a child under 18 or a vulnerable adult is at risk of serious harm

  • money laundering, criminal property or the proceeds of crime

  • a road traffic offence

  • female genital mutilation.

I may also be required to break confidentiality by an order from the courts or a tribunal.

In circumstances where you or someone else is at risk of death serious harm, I would need to consider whether the public interest outweighs my duty to maintain confidentiality. I take confidentiality extremely seriously and if ever I thought there was a need to break confidentiality, I would always aim to consult you first.

All psychotherapists are required to have a supervisor with whom they discuss their work. Supervisors are qualified psychotherapists themselves and are bound by the same confidentiality that psychotherapists are. I use clients’ first names only with my supervisor and they have no access to my client records.